Tag: Pedagogy

Beautiful Landscape With Bridge, by George Hodan License: CC0 Public Domain

Can students take a lead on managing and promoting their own learning?

Does this have to happen in the confines of institutional virtual learning environments?

Can academics and students take back control of their digital presence?

These were all questions explored yesterday in a workshop facilitated by Jim Groom at the National University of Ireland Galway title: Student As Partner: Enhancing Student Engagement Through a Focus on Assessment As Learning in Digital Spaces.

Let me quote from the advertising text to give you a flavour of what this event sought to deal with

The Student as Producer model advocates a pedagogic approach foregrounding student voice, choice and creativity so that students can recognise themselves in a world of their own design and take responsibility for their own learning. This has broad ramifications across the institution with respect to digital technology, learning spaces, and assessment (Healy et al., 2014; Neary et al., 2015). The Domain of One’s Own initiative emphasises a partnership approach to teaching and learning, and reworks the relationships between research and teaching; producing and consuming; and educators and students (Groom & Lamb, 2014). Partnership with students, not only as learners but as teachers and assessors, can contribute to developing graduate attributes and personal learning networks that can sustain students/graduates well beyond their time in higher education.

It is time for me to own up to the fact that I was co-responsible for this event along with my colleague Catherine Cronin. I am not an educational technology person so the event was conceived as an exploration of the space between different sets of ideas, specifically those of ‘student as producer’ and ‘open educational practices‘ (OEP), using Domain of Ones Own (DoOO). Catherine has already written about her hopes for the workshop and will write refections on it shortly. I want to focus on the elements I was mostly interested in and the thoughts I have had following working with Jim.

I was particularly interested in how ideas of students as producers (SaP) could articulate with technologies associated with open educational practices. In the workshop I outlined SaP as covering at least three dimensions;

Students devising learning materials: students involved in the development of curricular materials. For instance a project at the University of Lincoln UK involved undergraduate students producing a range of learning materials for an Introduction to Chemistry course.

Students as assessors: biology students at Vanderbilt University USA were engaged in devising laboratory based experiments and the assessment of these as an alternative to the traditional lab practical.

From my perspective students are engaged in assessment as learning in all of these examples. Students not only need to know what to learn, but why that knowledge is important (compared to alternatives), and to determine how they can learn. When further developed students also engage in generating new knowledge and meaning.

But how does this dovetail with OEP?

One way of understanding how approaches such as DoOO align with SaP is articulated by Audrey Waters recently as concerning,

Students have lost control of their personal data

By working in digital silos specially designed for the classroom (versus those tools that they will encounter in their personal and professional lives) students are not asked to consider how digital technologies work and/or how these technologies impact their lives

(You can substitute the word “scholar” for “student” in all cases above, too, I think.)

Whether it is VLEs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Academia or other platforms, we exchange our personal data and learning outcomes and teaching materials (in the case of VLEs) in exchange for use of these proprietorial services. DoOO offers the opportunity to control how our personal data is used and to control our digital presence. Jim shared examples of how academics were able to fashion strong digital identities that were not confined to the institution they happened to work in at any particular moment. This meant they could construct digital identities that were not confined to corporate priorities and branding. The same can be done by students. This relates to an issue raised both by Audrey Waters in her blog post and Catherine Cronin at the workshop – that the nature of VLEs and proprietorial platforms means that students and academics do not really engage with digital literacies such as protection of personal data, privacy, copyright, etc.

DoOO, for me, is attractive because it can be supportive of public and open scholarship. Similarly, it can support students to be producers of knowledge and meaning rather than consumers.

Like this:

So said Kurt Lewin, claimed to be a founder of social psychology and action learning.

This statement expresses itself as a paradox because it works with the apparent duality between theory and practice, or to put it another way – education and the ‘real world’. In this binary construction the ‘real world’ is the location of practice, of life, in contrast to the world of education and theory which takes on a deathly pallor. Theory, then, is seen to have little use to life. Lewin’s inversion of this makes it paradoxical, subverts the ‘common-sense’ character of the original binary opposition.

So, how then to make sense of Max Van Manen’s claim that phenomenology, that exquisite family of theory emanating from German idealism, is concerned with the ‘practice of living’?

Van Manen states this in his article titled ‘Phenomenology of Practice’. In this fine piece of prose Van Manen lays claim to the usefulness of theory, simultaneously asserting the practicality of theory AND challenging the usefulness of a common-sense view of practice:

Thus, we wish to explore how a phenomenology of practice may speak to our personal and professional lives

For Van Manen theory is eminently useful and practical, enabling us to gain purchase on what our ‘practice’ may be BECAUSE phenomenology is intimately concerned with how we live, how we experience life. But, theory is not useful if it simply promotes ‘instrumental action, efficiency or technical efficacy’.

Rather, a phenomenology of practice aims to open up possibilities for creating formative relations between being and acting, between who we are and how we act, between thoughtfulness and tact.

There is an ethical content to this that can often be missing from ‘theory-lite’ modes of thinking and teaching. Here I have in mind some aspects of Action Research and Action Learning.

As noted in some earlier posts I have been engaging with these literatures in order to enrich my own professional knowledge and practice in academic development. In one sense, our colleagues want something useful – new techniques for teaching or assessment, new skills in learning technologies, tips on how to supervise more effectively. And yes, we try to do this. But we also encourage them to critically reflect on this, and to some extent to deconstruct the normative content of what they claim to ‘want’.

But much Action Research and Action Learning would claim the same. Its just that in reading some of this material I sometimes get a feeling, and it often presents itself as a feeling, of uncomfortableness. Its almost as if I want to say: “It sounds fine in practice, but what use is it in theory?”. What I really mean by this is that the variations of ‘reflection-on-practice’ and ‘reflection-in-practice’ bracket the social world, the world of power and politics. There is often a distinct absence of political economy, of gender, social class and race. This is partly an effect of the location of the practice of much of the AR/AL I have been reading – management education.

For the purpose of this entry I need to put to one side the issue of the hyperbolic claims for critical theories of education that I have been embedded within all my professional life. I do want to say that there is a rigorous discussion within management education scholarship about issues of power and privilege. Its just in reading about ‘how to’ do it (AR/AL) this is not so apparent. It kind of speaks to me as the victory of practice over theory, of unconsidered life over the considered life.

And that is why this article by Van Manen is appealing to me.

Thinking of the importance we give to reflection as a methodology of professional education, Van Manen directs attention to the fact that reflection was an object of theoretical interest to Husserl. Our ‘experience’ of the world as temporal, as linked, as coherent, is an effect of perception – that is we do not ‘experience’ the world as a series of ‘now’ which we can then differentiate in terms of past, present and future. In asking our colleagues to ‘reflect’ on their experience of academic practice we are actually (if I understand Van Manen and Husserl correctly) asking them to bring objects into their perceptual field, to make aspects of practice intentional objects of our consciousness. In doing this aspects of what might be considered experience ‘in the past’ or ‘in the future’ are already changed. This is because we do not retain images of past events as fixed. In attending to a direct event or object (lets say our use of presentation software in large class teaching) we are already framing it in relation to ‘past’ (retention) and anticipated (protension) events. And what memories (if indeed these actually ‘exist’) we may have of previously using presentation software is transformed by brining an immediate object within our intentional gaze. Got it? I am not sure I have quite got it yet.

Let me try this again.

In asking our colleagues to intentionally focus on their use of presentation software now, in the past, and in the future we appear to be asking them to perceive these practices as somehow discrete entities. For Husserl and Heidegger and other phenomenologists we (as observers of temporal time) do not actually stand outside of the experience of time. There is no separation between ‘us’ and time. Time is a ‘taken-for-granted’, something we experience primordially and through our bodies. The pedagogy of reflection (using learning journals for instance) jolts us out of the ‘taken-for-granted’, makes the past-present-future of using presentation software an ‘object’ that we can some how interpret ‘as if’ it was something outside of the normal flow of practice. This is rather similar to Bourdieu’s argument that in research (as a particular social practice) we wrench events out of the flow of life and make them ‘objects of study’). But this flow of practice is full of interpretation, or pre-understanding (of what teaching is, of what learning is, of what learning technologies are); understandings that are often unarticulated. The jolt to the ‘taken-for-granted’ can (and I emphasise ‘can’) make us more aware (bring into consciousness) these pre-understandings and therefore the potential for creating new meaning. The ‘meaning’ of ‘presentation software’ arises from the narrative or story in which it is situated. This might be a narrative that places learning technologies within a person’s sense of themselves as a particular kind of educator; or within a story of career progression that necessitates (for that person) getting ‘such and such’ a skill or certificate under their belt; or perhaps in a narrative of being ‘out-of-place’ in academia and so needing to ‘prove’ oneself through taking up a professional development course. It will always be this learning at this time for this person. There is never experience in a general or objective sense. The ‘meaning’ of ‘presentation software’ therefore depends on what matters at that moment for that person. Therefore, phenomenological theory directs us to the central importance of ‘practice’ shorn of its ‘taken-for-granted’ garb.

Is this the lesson from phenomenology?

From the phenomenological perspective there is no me and then the world I engage with, I am in the world; there is no learning technology with which I engage, me and the technology and my use of it are all incorporated in my practice. My practice, my sense of self in this practice, cannot be captured adequately by the language of cognition alone. Teaching, as any of us will testify if we are honest, is about mood, atmosphere, relationships – it is what Van Manen talks of as pathic (as in empathy or sympathy). The local or private knowledge of the practitioner and the public (abstract) knowledge valued by academia are melded into one experiential, lived sensibility of ‘doing’ teaching, of ‘doing’ learning technologies. The ‘I’ or ‘me’ is in the practice rather than (cognitive) observer of that practice.

In conclusion, Van Manen says:

To reiterate, we may say that a phenomenology of practice operates in the space of the formative relations between who we are and who we may become, between how we think or feel and how we act. And these formative relations have pedagogical consequence for professional and everyday practical life.

[Does that make sense? As you can see I am working this out as I go along.]

Like this:

i picked up a tweet earlier today from @mike_rat concerning the possible/probable introduction of GPA (Grade Point Average) scores. this emanates from the UK’s Higher Education Academy facilitating a discussion on the introduction of GPA in the UK.

i am not sure why this particular item caught my attention, and why it ‘troubled’ me. i paused, and tried to locate where the feeling for this piece of news resided. i felt my heart pounding – like a flight/fight response. for a moment i wondered whether this was just an effect of the viral flu i have been suffering and/or the tinnitus.

for reasons i am still unsure of (and mike was very accommodating to my strange intervention) i tweeted these lines from the Tao Te Ching:

“Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt.” Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

what on earth did i mean? more properly, what on earth did these words mean to me and how did i think they related to the introduction of GPA?

the tweet appeared just after i had sent a student a very strongly worded email detailing how their draft dissertation would not pass the grade. all the way through reading and commenting on their work i struggled with what we ‘scientifically’ call formative and summative evaluation. how NEUTRAL these words appear.

i wanted to ENCOURAGE the student’s efforts, enthusiasm for the topic, commitment to social justice. i wanted to coach her in skills and tricks of the trade that could enable her to communicate her meaning more clearly. i still hold to what i said, to those nurturing comments in bold. as i wrote those comments, thought those thoughts, offered my own experience, i thought of what this degree might mean for her. i thought about the personal-emotional-financial investment, how this could be more than a private act as much as a family and communal act. i thought about my responsibility in enabling her to SUCCEED.

and then i thought about the network of texts into which she was now inserted – application forms, grade sheets, dissertation cover sheets, applications for extension, student progress reports, etc. i felt the weight of this. i knew she would be judged harshly and that i had better get in first so that she had some chance to get through with something that would affirm her.

so, she was attempting to pour nourishment into her bowl.

i contemplated grading her according to our 100 point scale, index her successes and failures according to percentage points against each descriptor.

i contemplated, in other words, to dehumanise what was an absolutely human endeavour.

i contemplated reducing her fears and hopes, anxieties and dreams to mere numbers.

i contemplated asking her to fill her bowl to the brim rather than choose carefully the food that nourishes, because filling to overflow appears more valued than the wisdom that might arise from her educational engagement.

and the knife that is blunted? the GAP perhaps; every technology of division and discrimination.

i know how students (i am one now myself) may welcome the detailed gradation offered by GPA systems. i know for myself how attracted i am to the descriptors and 100 point scale offered by our masters courses compared to the pass/fail on our professional doctorates. i know how as a teacher they help me direct attention to specific areas for development and to make my job of commenting easier when i am tired and find ‘creating’ hard. but surely these things come AFTER.

they come AFTER the relationship that is at the core of learning (relationship between teacher and student, between student and knowledge collectively produced over millennia).

they come AFTER the creation of knowledge that is the product of the uncertainty inherent in those relationships, the fact that we come to KNOW because we realise we don’t know, or see things as new, or come to KNOW what was formerly FELT.

they come AFTER we contemplate the WHY. why is this (degree, topic, writing, etc.) of value to THIS PERSON in the fulness of their living. all else is simply the games we play or are inclined to play in the context of ‘globalisation of higher education’. we know that the GPA will not change the basic discriminatory structure of global higher education.

Like this:

S: what, like you are trying to see the world through your students’ eyes?

me: this is not a philosophical point. i have registered on a programme of study, have a student card, student email account, access to an online learning environment, and a timetable.

S: you what?

me: i’m a student. actually, i am in my first session, and we are tasked to set up a blog as part of a module on ‘new media’. yipee!

S: but you have a blog.

me: i know, so i was momentarily thinking of setting up another one just for the course. but, no, i couldn’t manage two blogs like that.

S: so, you’re going to use this blog?

me: yes. why? do you think i shouldn’t?

S: well…

me: i know, i know, ethically it could be a problem. but i wouldn’t want to comment on my teachers or fellow (sorry for the gendered nature of that) students. the blog is a vehicle for reflecting on my identity as a teacher, to work out what teaching as service means in practice, to work through what teaching for wisdom might be like, what contemplative pedagogy is – for me. i have no wish to evaluate others, but i do hope that my reflections are of some interest or use to others who may come across the blog.

S: and you don’t mind your teachers and the other students seeing what you are thinking, what your ‘mission’ is?

me: no.

S: and you are on the course to pursue contemplative pedagogy?

me: no, not really.

S: then why?

me: well, for me mostly. just for FUN. i was just reading Ronald Pelias’ book “A Methodology of the Heart“. its a poetic contemplation on academic life. in one chapter, or essay really, he was considering how as an academic we spend so much time evaluating others – we evaluate our students (sometimes harshly), if we have managerial roles we evaluate our colleagues, our scholarly activity might involve evaluating policy makers (in my case) or other academics’ ideas or methodologies. yes, we are evaluated, but mostly we evaluate ourselves, and quite brutally at times.

S: and?

me: well, its nice to be on the other side, as it were. i want to engage with something mostly for its own value, enjoyment and not because it will help me write this article, teach that course, etc.

S: but this is aimed at teachers, right?

me: yes….OK, its also something that can help me with my new job, but that wasn’t really why i want to do this. i do want to enhance my pedagogic skills, but what i really want is to reinvigorate my artistic and creative angles. you know, i haven’t sketched in nearly 15 years or more. i have just started getting back into reading and writing poetry and it really makes me happy. the blog is part of that creativity i want to revive and make much more part of my academic me.

S: so what’s it like being a student?

me: great.

S: but?

me: what do you mean, but?

S: there is always a BUT with you. its the way your mind works, it is always interrogating, always trying to get under the surface, you know what i mean.

me: well….the but is nothing to do with the course, its me. i always want to be the ‘good’ student, the ‘good’ colleague’ or ’employee’.